As Lazarus Long said about writing, committing 3D images is nothing
to be ashamed of, so long as you do it in private and wash your hands
afterward.
One of the regulars on the Pibgorn comment group asked me how i converted
some
panels from Pibgornto 3D, and so here's a quick and dirty intro
to 3D and how to do it.
Are you sitting comfortably? Good.

HOW TO VIEW THE 3D IMAGES:These images are arranged for "crossed-eye viewing". Look at the pair of images and allow your eyes to cross slightly until the two images "fuse" into a single 3D image.(As a matter of some possible minor interest, you'll be seeing the image to the rightwith your left eye, and the one to the left with your right eye.Fascinating, no?)

To the left is a diagram
of your eyes (well, someone's eyes, or things that vaguely resemble
eyes) and three objects.

We will assume that you are primarily focusing on the middle object. When
you focus on a distant object, the sight lines from your two eyes converge
at that point, as shown by the dotted lines in the diagram.

Objects nearer or further than the point you're focused at will appear to
be shifted to the left or right in each eye's view. (Try this: point
your finger at a distant object, and then close one eye and then the other
without moving your hand; see how your finger seems to move to the left or
right. Your finger should look unshifted in one eye; that's your "dominant"
eye. For most people it's the right one. Not me, of course -
a weirdo to the end.)

In a 3D image, objects that have no displacement between the imagesare said
to be in the "Picture Plane" - that is, the apparent surface of the page
or the screen.
All other objects will appear either to be behind this plane, or in front
of it - coming out of the frame at you, as it were.

Notice that the object in front of the picture plane
is to the right of the left eye's sightline, and to the left of that of the
right eye, and vice versa for the object behind the picture plane. This is
the basis of stereo photography or art.

Here's a simple little picture of three objects;
a triangle, a square, and a circle.
You can tell that the circle is in front of the square and the square is
in front of the triangle, because each blocks out part of the object behind
it, and they have holes you can see the others through.
We'll assume that this is the view of the three objects that your right eye
will get; notice that they are in a straight line; you can look straight through the holes in all three and see the
background.
We'll make this the right eye view.
(When you're creating a stereo image, it's usually easyist to create a basic
reference image - generally the right image, because of that dominant eye
thing - and then to make changes relative to it for the other eye's view.

Same three objects, but notice that the circle has
shifted to the right relative to the square and the triangle has shifted
left. This will be the left eye view.(These images, BTW, were created using
Serif PagePlus X3, my favourite desktop publishing
software, which allowed me to position the objects accurately on different
layers and then export them as pictures.)

Now we're going to put things together.
Using a program called
StereoPhotomaker,
i have made three sets of stereo pairs of the two images.
StereoPhotomaker
allows me to decide just where the picture plane will be, by deciding what
objects will be in the same positions in both images.

(2)
Below, the triangle is the picture plane, and both the square and the circle
should appear to be floating in space in front of your monitor.
(Notice that the orange frame is actually in the same plane as the
square.)(Again, click for a bigger view).

(1)In the view above, i have decided that the square is in the picture
plane, the circle in front - apparently coming out in front of the screen
- and the triangle is behind the picture plane.(Click the image to see a larger version where the
3D effect will be clearer.)

(3)
And in the image above, the picture plane is set at the circle, and the square
and triangle both appear to be behind it.(You know the drill by now...)

So, to convert the image of Dru singing, using
Paint.net,
i cut out the images of Dru, the lettering, Geoff at the piano, and the
spotlight.
(Because Geoff's head overlaps Dru's shadow on the backdrop, and because
i needed to move the spot further left than i moved Geoff to position
it further back than Geoff, i had to make a small image of part of Geoff's
head with a transparent background, and then paste that in after i'd moved
both images to their final position.).
Then i made a new image, with Dru slightly right of her original position,
the lettering even further right relative to its original position, and Geoff
shifted somewhat to the left and the spotlight behind him even more to the
left.
That became the left-eye image.
And the original image became the right-eye image.
(One nice thing about this image is that the background isn't very complex;
i was able to clone other areas to fill in the blank spaces that i moved
everything from. That damned spotlight was the hardest - it's not perfect,
even now - because of the gradient in its colour...)
Then i loaded the images into StereoPhotomaker, and played with different
possible picture plane settings, finally deciding that using Dru as the main
element in the picture plane worked visually and emphasised that she was
the primary focus of the composition of the original panel.And that's How I Did It.

And this is the camera rig i used to take a lot of the pictures that you can see on my new stereo page:

It's pretty simple, and costs about nine bucks or less (assuming you already have a tube of silicone sealer/adhesive on hand), which is the cost of a two-pack of disposable cameras at WalMart, Dollar General or whatever; the sticks are paint-stirring paddles that you can pick up free at Home Depot or the like.

This particular rig is made with a much wider inter-ocular separation than your (or my) eyes - i like to shoot in "hyper-stereo", which gives the visual effect that you're about a thirty-foot tall giant (standing in a twenty-four foot hole), and gives more apparent depth to the images.

If you make one, and you'd prefer more normal stereo effect in your pitures, it isn't hard to mount the cameras so that the lens separation more closely matches your own inter-ocular diatance.

Obviously, you point it at whatever you want to shoot, and press both shutter buttons simultaneously (as closely as you can). If you check the picture of Fred leBlanc, Cowboy Mouth's drummer, you'll notice that his right arm and stick look funny that's because the time lag between exposures let it move slightly between the two views. Likewise the tip of Boris the cat's tail as he stands withhis paws on the bumper of our old van.

The
StereoPhotomaker
program is one of several interesting programs from Masuji Suto for creating
and manipulating 3D stereo images (as opposed to the kind of "3D Objects"
one produces with Poser and other such programs); his homepage is fascinating
if you're interested in such stuff...